After the speech, he used his fee to buy 240 copies of Mexican WhiteBoy for the students of Tucson High, saying he wanted to “give back what was taken away”.
De la Peña visited the school anyway, sharing his own experiences of art and cultural identity with a student body that is over 60 percent Latinx. The school district had recently ruled to ban all material that risked tangling with “critical race theory” and “promoting racial resentment”. De la Peña made his definitive strike in 2012, when a school in Tucson, Arizona, was forced to remove his novel Mexican WhiteBoy, along with the entire Mexican American studies program, from the curriculum.
Presented by the National Council of Teachers of English, the award recognizes individuals who take a stand against censorship and suppression.
Author Matt de la Peña has been honored with the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award.
